Abstraxa

Benge from The Maths has just released a new solo album, Abstraxa:

Abstraxa – exploring the outer reaches, using the Buchla Electronic Music Box 

The six compositions featured on Abstraxa were realised on a Buchla modular synthesiser. Donald Buchla began makng electronic musical instruments in 1963, developing the first Buchla 100 series systems in conjunction with the San Francisco Tape Music Center. These first inventions coincided with the development of Robert Moog’s 900 Series modular systems over on the west coast of america, and as such belong to the very first generation of commercially available synthesisers. One intersting aspect is that Don Buchla is still developing and manufacturing his modular systems, using the same module format (now 200e series) that he introduced 50 years ago. The current 200e modules utilise a combination of analogue and digital components

The Buchla has a very unique way of producing sound, using electronic voltages to control the sound sources (oscillators and noise generators), sound modifiers (gates, filters, phase shifters, modulators, etc) and event timing generators (sequencers, random sources, pulse generators, etc). Systems can be built up from the available modules to suit the needs of the composer. The power of the system lies in the inter-modulation capabilities. This means that extremely deep patches can be set up with a myriad of connections interacting together in complex ways to produce evolving and self-generating soundscapes. It is anagolous to working with a living organism as opposed to a static machine, a brain rather than a computer.

LISTEN TO ABSTRAXA HERE